Michael Emerson Quotes

As you may know, previously as Attorney General and now as Governor, I have supported legislation to close the gun show loophole in North Carolina.

So the tradition from Europe is that you're supposed to emphasize the mind over the body, so you sing from a very kind of staid perspective. Again, there are charismatic white congregations all over, and they don't sing that way. But, you know, on the average.

Then of course there are bigger things that matter, like who do I see up there in the congregation? Do I see myself up there? Well, I don't.

So you find a lot of these sixth Americans congregate in these interracial congregations. They hang out together at work, at school, wherever.

I may have to shop with them. But on Sunday I don't want to have to worship with them. I want to be able to just be myself and let my hair down." It's also, of course, as we know, the seat of political organization and the affirming of your blackness and so on.

Call-and-response style, yes, exactly. So whenever different groups get together then there has to be this long period of negotiation. How will we worship? What's acceptable? What's not? If I want to say "Amen" can I?

Downsides, yeah, and when there are more downsides when churches first start - they go through stages of transforming to becoming multiracial. So in the beginning stages there's often a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of people leave.

But in the US, when you have two separate cultures, each with its right, each of which has come to exist in this political entity in the last couple hundred years, each feeling like, "I have the right to hold onto my culture," and that's what makes it difficult.

Maybe there's even anger. But if they make it through that they come to a new agreement, and they start creating a new culture, and it becomes something that people just - a lot of times they'll say, "I couldn't live without it. I just have to be there."

We've had people say, "Now when I go to work, I don't feel uncomfortable talking to people of different races, and I go up and introduce myself, and I start making a new friend I wouldn't have done otherwise."

It happens a little bit more in the West, where there's more fluid - where everybody's originally from somewhere else. So they have a little bit more permission to do it. It happens the least, at the individual level at least, in the South, because the South has very strong, you know, set up black churches and white churches and a long history of that, and so it's a bigger social cost.

I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.

I ask the clergy why don't I see myself represented in leadership? And I'm told, and this happens quite a bit, "We don't think about race when we hire. We just hire the best person for the job."

I think it's pretty dynamic. There's a lot of energy there and life, and you'll have women dressed in their traditional African dress when they come, and you have people from all over the place, and some people have headphones on because they're listening in Spanish.

So different groups have different definitions, and then they clash on those. So it takes adept leadership to say we're going to work through these.

There's a lot of life there, but it's a different sort, because there's a lot less immigrants and a lot more racial, the mix of black and white in particular. I've actually never been to their worship for an extended period of time, so I can't comment wisely on it.

What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.

It worries me a little bit the reach and power of TV. More people saw me in The Practice than will ever see me in all the stage plays I ever do. Which is sort of humbling. Or troubling. Or both.

I think it's easier, I really do, because of not having that similar history, so that's why I think two-thirds of these mixed congregations are either white with Asian and Hispanic, or black with Asian and Hispanic.

I think it's going to open up a wider place for a discussion about we ought to come together in our churches, in our neighborhoods, in our work places, in our clubs and our networks. I think it'll be more acceptable to talk about it. We'll see what happens. It'll take some time. But I think it will.

Now they had to sit in separate places and sometimes they'd even have to sit outside and look through the windows. But they did worship together.

I see this in the way that sermons are preached. How would you give a Black Nationalist speech or campaign for the Republicans when you're an integrated congregation? It doesn't happen.

But what we found in the study is that churches are ten times less diverse than the neighborhoods they sit in. So there's something more going on than just reflecting the neighborhood, yeah.

In your actor's heart, you know when you're playing well. Others may not always agree with you, but I'm always aware of when the scene is cooking or not. You have an instinct about that from years of doing scenes and plays, and I think it stands you in good stead even in the TV world.

It's the sad fact of how race still works in our country. We find that over and over again.

Preaching styles and people being slain in the spirit and things like that. Now it doesn't happen in all black churches, and it happens sometimes in white churches, right? But on average they're quite a bit different.

And again, this connection that you get: I meet Joe at church. Joe's connected to a whole network of people I don't know. Joe likes me. He invites me over to his son's birthday party, and I meet his whole family. I meet his friends. I get to know his neighborhood. That happens all the time.

I mean, so if I've talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they'll wonder, "Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?" And what's happening is they're falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It's not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That's certainly common in mixed churches.

I've been blessed by doing classic plays on Broadway, which was one of my great dreams forever.

So there was great clashes when, you know, if you believe you shouldn't remove your shoes and someone's taking their shoes off, how can they do this? That actually was such a big clash in this case that they had to put a curtain down the middle of where they would worship.

They could never go back to being a uniracial congregation again. It brings excitement. It brings life. It allows them to be able to know people they would never know, to meet people that are outside the congregation they would have never connected with, you know, through the networks that they developed in the congregation.

We've done a lot of studies to see when they do happen, why, and I mean there's a variety of reasons. But one, it starts with a commitment where they decide this is going to be who we are. Maybe it's out of their faith, a new way of looking at their faith, that we must be integrated across race.

So it may be a language that separates you - again, social networks. But second-generation Asian and Hispanics, second, and third and fourth and so on, they are much more likely to be in integrated churches than are blacks or whites.

What sort of difficulties would happen when people of different cultures try to come together to worship? Tiny little things such as let's tell jokes with each other.

So we didn't get the denominations and the separate congregations really till about into Civil War time. What's happened then, of course, is now that we've had well over 100 years of this history to establish separate cultures, different ways of worshipping, and different ways of understanding theology so that when people try to come together makes it very difficult. And then, of course, social networks, you know, how do we find a place to worship?